Terry Bisson Story Showcase

"I can't resist television. I am too curious to see what the humans are doing." --Poe Ballantine

All original copyrighted™ material. Enjoy, but please don't read aloud, reproduce, perform, memorize, interpolate, illustrate, translate, or discuss with anyone living or dead without the express permission™ of the Author and/or his or her Attorneys.

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SF in SF

Monthly Author Reading Series

Sponsored by Tachyon, at the VARIETY Screening Room 582 Market St, San Francisco.

Saturday, May 17, 2008; 7 pm
John Shirley & Daniel Marcus

Coming Attractions for 2008 include Carol Emshwiller, Cecilia Holland, Jay Lake, Kim Stanley Robinson, plus a perennial favorite back by popular demand, Ann Uthers. Watch this space or our SFinSF website.

Biography of the world-renowned journalist/death row political prisoner. Order it here .

"Opens an important window on the life of a brilliant and uncompromising dissident." --Tom Morello, Rage Against the Machine.

"A powerful book--I couldn't put it down." --Sister Helen Prejean, author,Dead Man Walking.

"To read this book is to gain deep insights into the issues of race and poverty." --Howard Zinn

"A book that will inspire action--and life." --Chuck D

" Bisson does a masterful job of defining the character of one of America's most profound journalists- --Peter Coyote

Mumia is a first rate revolutionary journalist, a wicked satirist, an eclectic humanist scholar, and a friend to all who love justice. TB strongly recommends Mumia's own books: LIVE FROM DEATH ROW, DEATH BLOSSOMS, and his newest, WE WANT FREEDOM

kids' stuff

TRADIN' PAINT (Scholastic, Dec 2001) Stock car racing legends and newcomers for young readers.

BOBA FETT: The Fight to Survive (Scholastic, April 2002) The Bounty Hunter's troubled youth.

BOBA FETT: Crossfire (Scholastic, 2002) More of the same.

BE FIRST IN THE UNIVERSE (Dell, 2000) with Stephanie Spinner. Kids meet alien at the mall.

EXPIRATION DATE: NEVER (Dell, 2002) also with Stephanie. Kids foil evil twins with help of mall alien.

"a wild ride!"

--F&SF

PIRATES OF THE UNIVERSE (Tor paperback)

"The Most Reviewed SF Novel of 1996"

A New York Times "Notable Book" for 1996

"Surprising and compelling ... a stylish exploration of the dream-infested psyche of Gunther Ryder, who hunts extraterrestrials for a living, suffers from real and virtual sexual frustration, and discovers (to his and our satisfaction) that you can go home again." --NY TIMES

"A work of cunning sublety and complexity ...brilliant." --LOCUS

"Another gem from one of SF's leading innovators."--BOOKLIST

($10 postpaid--email author and explain why you lost your copy in ten words or less)

"60 RULES for SHORT SF" is out in the NY Review of SF, or so I hear. Look for it at your newsstand today.

Billy and the Flying Saucer is up on YouTube. Smokers beware! This is a video from LitQuake, a San Francisco literary happening.

"The Stamp" my shortest short-short ever (at under 500 words) is online in Eric Marin's nifty little Lone Star Stories.

FLURB #5 has arrived, squeezing (as Rudy Rucker puts it) the rubber chicken of science fiction to produce Art. My "Captain Ordinary" looks sort of mundane in such brilliant company, but that's intentional.

"Writer's Block Moves" TB's (retitled) non-fiction survey of what writers do when writers don't, is out in the June Writer's Digest. Thanks to all the famous scribblers and friends who helped out with this.

A 47 min. mini-feature film of "Incident at Oak Ridge" directed by Nayazu Zyanya (Bangkok) is up on Veoh.com. The preview can be found on YouTube.

"Pirates of the Somali Coast" from Datlow's Subterranean #7 has been bought by Hartwell for their upcoming Year's Best SF 13. Swashbucklin' fun.

"The Dock of the What" a short radio play dealing with the issue of verisimilitudinousness in popular music, is up at ElectricStory. This is also a good site to check for Lucius Shepard's brilliant, provocative, erudite, often wrong-headed film reviews

"Carapans" a photo essay with Rosalie Winard, will appear in Aeon online magazine in May or August 2008. It documents the recent discovery of non-biological life in New York's Jamaica Bay.

Postcripts from England will be featuring "Let Their People Go: The Left Left Behind"--a leisurely satire of the grandiosely demented LEFT BEHIND Rapture bestsellers, written in collaboration with the late Patrice Duvic. '08 but no pub date yet.

"Planet of Mystery" a novella about the first landing on Venus (F&SF, Jan & Feb 2006) will be published by England's PS in 2008. The PS edition of Billy's Book (also in '08) will make the perfect gift for that rotten kid on your list.

On the academic front, I wrote the wrap-up (Afterword) for Margret Grebowicz's SciFi in the Mind's Eye (Open Court) which also features Nicola Griffith and L. Timmel Duchamp and Nancy Kress. Right now I'm editing Professor Heather Thompson's monumental study of the Attica Prison Rebellion, Blood in the Water; starting to work on a memoir by one of the "Angola Three"; and "consulting"on an 80,000 year historical novel about the human diaspora.

Thanks for asking.

Prize Winning Film:"They're Made out of Meat"

Stephen O'Regan's film of the short story won Grand Prize at the Science Fiction Museum's SF Short Film Festival in Seattle in 2006.

GREETINGS & Other Stories is TB's Flagship Collection, from Tachyon. It contains three novellas and a bunch of short stories. Publishers Weekly calls it "crisp," which is high praise for a cracker from western Kentucky.

This Month in History appears in Locus every month. It's an expansion and continuation of a feature that began in Eileen Gunn's cool Infinite Matrix e-zine. "Let's put the future behind us. " --Jack Womack

Check out AMAZON SHORTS. Worth at least a half a dollar; cheap at forty-nine cents. My 9/11 story was originally intended for NY Magazine's 5-year anniversary issue, but they turned it down as "sentimental." A first for me! "Billy and the Bulldozer" is an inspiring story about a little boy and his struggle to kill the family next door. "Special Relativity" is a one-act play about Einstein and some friends, one of whom wears a dress.

American Rebels edited by Jack Newfield and Mark Jacobson, has my essay on Edward Abbey. The follow-up 'bad guys' volume, American Monsters has my piece on evangelist Billy Graham.

THE PICKUP ARTIST There's too much stuff. So thousands of CDs, novels, movies, paintings must be deleted every year to make room for new art. That was Hank's job. Until he met the girl in the bluebird sweater--

"Not only wit but a nice clean prose. I read it from cover to cover, and I didn't even have to." --Marc Norman, Oscar-winning author of SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE

($10 postpaid. Email author and explain why you want one in ten words or less.)

Crash Test Dummy

Photo by Scott Braley; car by Tom Duncan, SCCA

SF Weekly Interview by Nick Gevers (everything you never wanted to know and much more):

non fiction

R.A. Lafferty (1914-2002) eulogy.

The Singularity

Fred Pohl's Heechee novels

Detroit, We Have a Problem

SF Humor

The Case of Mumia Abu Jamal

Intro to THE PERPETUITY BLUES by Neal Barrett, Jr.

A Canticle for Miller: how I met St. Leibowitz & the Wild Horse Woman but not Walter M. Miller, Jr.

Seven Ways to Beat Writer's Block and How I Made Them Work for Me

The Primal Ooze, Clark Dimond, and the Kitchen Sink

The Black Panthers

Hawk Debate Heats Up

Bluegrass on the Banks of the Ohio

SF and the Post-Apollo Blues

Voyage to the Red Continent

Owensboro Hall of Fame

Not so very long ago a science fiction writer was inducted into the Owensboro, Kentucky, Hall of Fame, along with such superstars as Darrel Waltrip, Johnny Depp, Cliff Hagan and Bill Monroe. Strong company and a great honor indeed.

Another singular honor: receiving the 2000 Short Story Nebula from the late great Robert Sheckley, a hero and role model. I told him: "If it weren't for you, I'd probably have a job today."

With Mike Kandel and John Kessel, in NY, waiting for the saucer to land with more beer.

from ElectricStory or Amazon: fire up your Kindle!

Numbers Don't Lie in which math wizard Wilson Wu and his rather elementary watson, Irv (the perv), go to the Moon, plug a leak in Time, save the Universe and attend a Wedding. Based on actual incidents!

"A leisurely Golden Age tall tale enriched by the wonderful gibberish of mathematical physics. All fun and pure pleasure." -Rudy Rucker

An ursine classic, BEARS DISCOVER FIRE (the collection), now available from ElectricStory in Microsoft Reader and Rocketbook formats.

IN THE UPPER ROOM and Other Likely Stories (Tor)

"One of the field's truly distinct voices!" --Locus

"Cutting edge SF!" --Publishers Weekly

"Generously endowed with sharp wit, dead-on dialogue and the storytelling gifts of a born raconteur." --SF Weekly

"Rousing entertainment... underwear, equations, entities and all." --Kirkus

"Bisson's imaginative take-offs on string and chaos theories and the vagaries of cyberspace are as shrewd as they are playful. Witty stories with a timeless sweetness and allure. Speculative fiction that transcends its genre. A good choice for Douglas Adams fans." --Booklist

Posthumous Collaboration

SAINT LEIBOWITZ AND THE WILD HORSE WOMAN

By Walter M. Miller, Jr. (Bantam)

TB completed the book after Miller's death--see story in non-fiction (left). This is a very different book from CANTICLE--a mature, wry, almost Tolstoyan exploration of the conflict between Spirit and Flesh played out on the High Plains of North America (circa 2800) and in the soul of one persistent and bright if not terribly wise young monk.